Willie Fritz Talks Oregon State Win & Previews Southern University Match Up

0:00six forty six. Matt and Ross in the morning on sports talk seven. I'm friends with dry car practice at Fisher car practice or Houston, KUG. Our athletics brings you Willie Fritz here on the show. Well, good morning. I feel like every time I ask coaches and I've probably done this the last couple of years with you. What do you do when you look at that first game tape? I always hear that cliche term a lot of correctable things. So what did you try as guys try to correct this week? Well, you're right. I'm going to cliche right there. There was a lot of stuff we could correctly. Who didn't play a real Chris game all three sides of the ball. You know, it's good when you get away and you're able to do correct guys on things you can do better. I thought for the first ball game, I thought we tackled really well, which you know came one and you don't do a lot of tackling the preseason camp. You're always a little concerned about that. We tackled well and it has that weight too many pre-snap penalties. I think we had eight. You know, we jumped off sides a couple times on defense. We had

1:04a little procedure for at least with the offensive line on five times. So you know, there's some things that we just got to clean it up and do better at and you know, the guys understand that they've worked hard this week. So we'll get that done this week. Well, we're football fans. So we like to pay attention to skill positions. Mackay was great. A big game for him. Obviously, Amari Thomas getting a lot of preseason run. A counter played well. I mean, so from a section to standpoint, your stars came out to play for you against Oregon State. Jerry really did. I thought Amari a great game. Had a huge catch for us. We were losing a little bit of momentum. They made a big catch. Let's do a touchdown. Kind of put the game out of reach. And Mackay first time he got a bunch of curries and then you know, since he played for me back at 2.5 years ago. So good for him to get back in there and get after it. Sean St. For have been really pleased with him. You know, he had a

2:0650-something yard touchdown. You know, a guy had an ACL injury two years ago played for us. My first season here then had another ACL injury. Another knee last year set out the whole year. So he's gone through a lot of adversity and it's great to see guys like that come back from it. I don't know if you are much into staring at the stats, but when you have good balance, 530 something yards and total offense almost equal in terms of Russian passes. Is that a Willie Fritz style of offense you want to see or is it depend on what the opponent brings to you? Yeah, but you know, both we really feel like we're 50 sets. You've got a great chance to be successful. You know, the run really opens up the pass. It really doesn't go the other way around the pass opening up the run. So if we're going to run it, we feel like it really helps our pass game out. You know, we've got weapons in the run game and our offensive line is good at run blocking and pass blocking. So we want to be able to do both each and every ball game. Knowing you the last couple of years, the first thing you think about when you were in the media availability

3:10after the Oregon State game is you did not like the turnover number. That's one of those things that maybe when you went to coaching 101 your first day, you're like, I need to as a coach, explain to my kids, you have to win the turnover battle. Yeah, so important. Now, you know, in my career at all these different places, I've been at you. Coatty to one, double a, you know, group of six, powerful now, you know, we've been plus one or better. We've won 91. Something percent of our game. So it's a really telling statistic and something that we preach as far as ball security every day practice. And you know, we have equipment managers out there, and officials uniforms or guys, you dominate the ball, hand it to the official after every single place. So it's huge. You know, the two turnovers we had, we were driving, we were touchdowns, and you know, now the drives over with. So we got to do a better job of not only taking care of the football, but we got to create more takeaways. We did that. I think we dropped three

4:11intersections. You know, a couple of them are pretty easy. It's right, right in the hands. And you know, the same thing you got to teach the defense back to catch ball like the wider receivers. You know, well, every game can be a storyline. You know, you get out to the big lead, and then you see Oregon State put together a couple of drives and making close. And obviously, you'd like to be able to win and play a complete 60 minutes, but was there part of you that was pleased that as Oregon State was trying to make this a ball game with the fourth goal. You guys came back and eventually put it away. No, I'd rather just whip them. That's fair. I get that. I like that. But no, we, you know, hey, we had to fight through some diversity. We had to do some there's some things that we do. You know, the clock management wise that we had to do. Also, you know, we just wanted to finish a little bit better. Part of that was the turnovers. And you know, part of that was a way of a couple of buffs and coverages, you know, that hurt us as well.

5:11You know, that happens in the first ball game, but it was a good thing. I think Oregon State's going to win some games this year that he had good squad. And you know, it was a good matchup for us in week one without question. I'll let you go on this. Marshall Falk is the first year coach at Southern. And he had a very interesting thing to say, which I thought to me was a sign of the times. He's like, we're going to play the University Houston. And there's a lot of kids in this football team that have aspirations of playing at perhaps a bigger school. So he's, he's almost selling into the kids of, hey, you want to show up and show out. You got a chance to maybe play somewhere else down the road at perhaps a bigger school. That's a, it's an interesting way for a coach to kind of motivate his kids. You know, I've kind of heard that from a few different people. You know, they're putting, putting things on film and, you know, other people nowadays, you can watch films of anybody that plays golf football across the country. And some people are selling that to get guys to come in and show that you can move to another level and all those kind of things.

6:15You know, I know Southern's going to come in here. I don't know Coach Falk, but I knew his high school coach really well in New Orleans. He's in New Orleans, guys. The big hero in New Orleans. I'd be excited to meet him before the game, but yeah, they're going to come in and try to show what they can do against that. So we want to make that big improvement from week one to week two. Everything the country's wanting to do that. That's certainly what the coos are going to do. Well, I hope that you don't have to worry about excessive heat or rain delays or lightning and this week because I know those things can throw you guys off. Congratulations on the win last week and best of luck on Saturday against a Southern. Thank you. Go, go. Thank you very much. That's Willie Fritz, head football coach of your Houston, googers getting ready for a six o'clock tilt with Southern this week inside TD. So you stadium seven one three gocoos if you'd like to go to the game. And of course, this could be a representative of our friends at the joint, chiropractic, the official chiropractor of the university of Houston.